Just Say No

If a political party cannot persuade anyone to give it any money, then it does not deserve to exist. But such is politicians’ and party hacks’ self-importance that they refuse to accept this self-evident fact. Their nationalisation of political parties would only make a baleful situation even worse. State funding of anything means state control. It has to, and in many cases it needs to.

Already, the only designation other than “Independent” permitted on a ballot paper is the name of a political party approved by the Electoral Commission. That Commission must approve the party’s constitution (including its aims and objectives), and must approve the Party Leader.

Some commission or committee would have to decide which parties or candidates deserved to be held up to the public teat. We can imagine only too easily who those commissioners or committee members would be, and therefore on what basis they would make their judgements.

All this merely to end the dying Labour Party’s dependence on the thriving trade unions, the only clean money left in British politics. Trade unions’ millions of members live, work and pay taxes the length and breadth of Britain. Unions have to ballot their members about maintaining a political fund, and even then individuals have to opt into it.

But that is precisely the problem so far as the political class is concerned: the combination of popularity, ordinariness, provincialism, democracy, liberty, and the vulgar practice of working for a living. That class wants to destroy the influence of the popular, the ordinary, the provincial, the democratic, the free and the hard-working. Indeed, it wants to destroy these social-democratic, socially conservative, patriotic things themselves, in order to destroy social democracy, social conservatism, and patriotism.

State funding of political parties is a key weapon in that destruction. Just say no.